Educative Experience

Item	Quote	Source	Respondent
EE1	Nothing can be developed out of nothing; nothing but the crude can be developed out of the crude – and this is what surely happens when we throw the child back upon his achieved self as a finality, and invite him to spin new truths of nature or conduct out of that.	The Child and the Curriculum, p. 196
EE2	It is not possible to divide in a vital experience the practical, emotional, and intellectual from one another and to set the properties of one over against the characteristics of the other.	Art as Experience, p. 55
EE3	Tangles scenes of life are made more intelligible in esthetic experience; not, however, as reflection and science render things more intelligible by reduction to conceptual form, but by presenting their meanings as the matter of a clarified, coherent, and intensified or “impassioned” experience.	Art as Experience, p. 290	Macintyre Latta
EE4	The practical problem of the teacher is to preserve a balance between so little showing and telling as to fail to stimulate reflection and so much as to choke thought.	How We Think, p. 208
EE5	Classification is not a matter of child experience; things do not come to the individual pigeonholed. The vital ties of affection, the connecting bonds of activity, hold together the variety of his personal experiences.	The Child and the Curriculum, p. 184
EE6	The need of the familiar, the already experienced, as a basis for moving upon the unknown and remote is a commonplace. The claims of the child’s imagination as a factor is at least beginning to be recognized. The problem is to work these two forces together, instead of separately.	The School and Society, p. 143

Item	Quote	Source	Respondent
EE7	He (the teacher) must constantly regard what is already won not as a fixed possession but as an agency and instrumentality for opening new fields which make new demands upon existing powers of observation and of intelligent use of memory. Connectedness in growth must be his constant watchword.	Experience and Education, p. 90
EE8	It thus becomes the office of the educator to select those things within the range of existing experiences that have the promise and potentiality of presenting new problems which by stimulating new ways of observation and judgment will expand the area of further experience.	Experience and Education, p. 90
EE9	Anything which can be called a study, whether arithmetic, history, geography, or one of the natural sciences, must be derived from materials which at the outset fall within the scope of ordinary life-experience.	Experience and Education, p. 86-87
EE10	Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.	Experience and Education, p. 13
EE11	Any power, whether of child or adult, is indulged when it is taken on its given and present level in consciousness. Its genuine meaning is in the propulsion it affords toward a higher level.	The Child and the Curriculum, p. 193
EE12	Familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds something like affection. We get used to the chains we wear, and we miss them when they are removed. . . It is possible for the mind to develop interest in a routine or mechanical procedure if conditions are continually supplied which demand that mode of operation and preclude another sort.	The Child and the Curriculum, p. 206

Item	Quote	Source	Respondent
EE13	Absolutely no separation is made between the “social” side of the work, its concern with people’s activities and their mutual dependencies and the “science” regard for physical facts and forces – because the conscious distinction between man and nature is the result of later reflection and abstraction, and to force it upon the child here is not only to fail to engage his whole mental energy, but to confuse and distract him.	The School and Society, p. 141
EE14	To assume that anything can be known in isolation from its connections with other things is to identify knowing with merely having some object before perception or in feeling, and is thus to lose the key to the traits that distinguish an object as known.	The Quest for Certainty, p. 213
EE15	The environment, the world of experience, constantly grows larger and, so to speak, thicker. The educator who receives the child at the end of this period has to find ways for doing consciously and deliberately what “nature” accomplishes in the earlier years.	Experience and Education, p. 88
EE16	Since freedom resides in the operations of intelligent observation and judgment by which a purpose is developed, guidance by a teacher to exercise of the pupil’s intelligence is an aid to freedom, not a restriction upon it.	Experience and Education, p. 84
EE17	The traditional scheme is, in essence, one of imposition from above and from outside. It imposes adult standards, subject matter, and methods upon those who are only growing slowly toward maturity. The gap is so great that the required subject matter, the methods of learning and of behaving are foreign to the existing capacities of the young.	Experience and Education, p. 18-19
EE18	How many students, for example, were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them? How many acquired special skills by means of automatic drill so that their power of judgment and capacity to act intelligently in new situations was limited?	Experience and Education, p. 15
Item	Quote	Source	Respondent
EE19	The environment, in other words, is whatever conditions interact with personal needs, desires, purposes, and capacities to create the experience which is had. Even when a person builds a castle in the air he is interacting with the objects which he constructs in his fancy.	Experience and Education, p. 42
EE20	Experience is an affair of facilitation and checks, of being sustained and disrupted, being let along, being helped and troubled, of good fortune and defeat in all the countless qualitative modes which these words pallidly suggest.	The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, p. 51
EE21	We have laid it down that the educative process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every stage an added capacity of growth.	Democracy and Education, p. 54	Shaker
EE22	Any experience, however trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections.	Democracy and Education, p. 217
EE23	The educative activities of childhood should be so arranged that direct interest in the activity and its outcome create a demand for attention to matters that have a more and more indirect and remote connection with the original activity.	How We Think, 141
EE24	Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems it conveys.	Democracy and Education, p. 233
EE25	Such a teacher will have no difficulty in seeing that the real problem of intellectual education is the transformation of natural powers into expert, tested powers: the transformation of more or less casual curiosity and sporadic suggestion in attitudes of alert, cautious and thorough inquiry.	How We Think, p. 62

Item	Quote	Source	Respondent
EE26	There is a genuine need for taking account of spontaneous interest and activity but, without care and thought it readily results in a detached multiplicity of isolated brief-lived activities or projects, not in continuity of growth.	“The Need for a Philosophy of Education” in The Later Works, Vol. 9, p. 200
EE27	It is clear that with the increasing differentiation of lines of work and interest, leading to greater individuality and independence in various studies, great care must be taken to find the balance between, on the one side, undue separation and isolation, and, on the other, a miscellaneous and casual attention to a large number of topics, without adequate emphasis and distinctiveness to any.	The School and Society, p. 110
EE28	We do not have a series of stratified earths, one of which is mathematical, another physical, another historical, and so on. We should not be able to live very long in any one taken by itself. We live in a world where all sides are bound together. All studies grow out of relations in one great common world. When the child lives in varied but concrete and active relationship to this common world, his studies are naturally unified.	The School and Society, p. 91	Weilbacher
EE29	The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is not clear social gain in success thereat. Indeed, almost the only measure for success is a competitive one, in the bad sense of that term – a comparison of results in the recitation or in the examination to see which child has succeeded in getting ahead of others in storing up, in accumulating, the maximum of information.	The School and Society, p. 15

Item	Quote	Source	Respondent
EE30	From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school.	The School and Society, p. 75	Wilhelm
EE31	Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child’s experience; cease thinking of the child’s experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum and simply two limits which define a single process.	The Child and the Curriculum, p. 189	Reid
EE32	Since the curriculum is always getting loaded down with purely inherited traditional matter and with subjects which represent mainly the energy of some influential person or group of persons in behalf of something dear to them, it requires constant inspection, criticism, and revision to make sure it is accomplishing its purpose. Then there is always the probability that it represents the values of adults rather than those of children or youth, or those of pupils a generation ago rather than those of present day.	Democracy and Education, p. 241
EE33	The source of whatever is dead, mechanical, and formal in schools is found precisely in the subordination of the life and experience of the child to the curriculum.	The Child and the Curriculum, p. 187	Klein

"Experiences in order to be education must lead out into and expanding world of subject matter. . . . At every level there is an expanding development of experience if experience is educative in effect." (Experience and Education, 60-61). E. Short

"Until the artist is satisfied in perception with what he is doing. . . This sensitivity also directs his doings and makings" (Art as Experience, 56) Willis

"If the subject-matter of the lessons be such as to have an appropriate place within the expanding consciousness of the child. . . that is, it is placed in the whole of conscious life so that it shares the worth of that life" (The Child and the Curriculum, 288) Morris

"Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful." (Experience and Nature, 166) Biesta

The Educative Experience

Current number of additional entries possible in this section: 0

Educative Experience